Page 134 - ENTREPRENEURSHIP Innovation and entrepreneurship

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Source: New Knowledge 127

innovations exploit a change that has already occurred. They satisfy a
need that already exists. But in knowledge-based innovation, the inno-
vation brings about the change. It aims at creating a want. And no one
can tell in advance whether the user is going to be receptive, indiffer-
ent, or actively resistant.
There are exceptions, to be sure. Whoever produces a cure for can-
cer need not worry about “receptivity.” But such exceptions are few.
Inmost knowledge-based innovations, receptivity is a gamble. And
the odds are unknown, are indeed mysterious. There may be great
receptivity, yet no one realizes it. And there may be no receptivity, or
even heavy resistance when everyone is quite sure that society is actu-
ally eagerly waiting for the innovation.
Stories of the obtuseness of the high and mighty in the face of
a knowledge-based innovation abound. Typical is the anecdote
which has a king of Prussia predicting the certain failure of that
new-fangled contraption, the railroad, because “No one will pay
good money to get from Berlin to Potsdam in one hour when he
can ride his horse in one day for free.” But the king of Prussia
was not alone in his misreading of the receptivity to the railroad;
the majority of the “experts” of his day inclined to his opinion.
And when the computer appeared there was not one single
“expert” who could imagine that businesses would ever want such
a contraption.
The opposite error is, however, just as common. “Everybody
knows” that there is a real need, a real demand, when in reality there
is total indifference or resistance. The same authorities who, in 1948,
could not imagine that a business would ever want a computer, a few
years later, around 1955, predicted that the computer would “revolu-
tionize the schools” within a decade.
The Germans consider Philip Reis rather than Alexander Graham
Bell to be the inventor of the telephone. Reis did indeed build an
instrument in 1861 that could transmit music and was very close to
transmitting speech. But then he gave up, totally discouraged. There
was no receptivity for a telephone, no interest in it, no desire for it.
“The telegraph is good enough for us,” was the prevailing attitude. Yet
when Bell, fifteen years later, patented his telephone, there was an
immediate enthusiastic response. And nowhere was it greater than in
Germany.
The change in receptivity in these fifteen years is not too difficult
to explain. Two major wars, the American Civil War and the Franco-